Silvia Ferreri

Brief Biography

Professor Ferreri had her
first teaching experience at the Bocconi
University in Milan, where she was a young researcher
starting in 1980. In 1983, she became a lecturer in comparative law at the University of Turin School Of Law, working under the
leadership of Professor Rodolfo Sacco. She published her first two books: the
first one deals with the harmonization of the legal systems (including a study
of the mechanisms of incorporation of international instruments into a national
legal system, comparing different approaches to the problem of integrating
foreign sources into one's own complex of rules and concepts); the second one
is a comparative research on the remedies to recover possession of moveables in
the opposition between the proprietary outlook of the civil law and the
tortious approach of the common law. She also taught Comparative Law in the
recently created University of Eastern Piedmont (Alessandria). She got national tenure in
1992, and full professorship in 1996, teaching in Venice,
Alessandria and Turin where she was elected on the Chair of
Comparative Law, created by Rodolfo Sacco, in 2002.

Three more books have been
written between 1998 and 2006: one in cooperation with a former judge at the
Italian Constitutional Court (A. Pizzorusso) on the system of written sources
of law in Italy (with special focus on the mechanisms and reactions of local
law to foreign sources such as European legislation and international
conventions); a second work on the interpretation of contract, especially on
the parallel between the strictly literal attitude of the common lawyers and
the more flexible legislative prescriptions about interpretation in the civil
codes of the Roman tradition; a third book in cooperation with Prof. Alberto
Musy on the contract of sale, with special attention for the comparison between
the local legislative frame of the contract and the features of the
International Sale of Goods as shaped by the Vienna convention of 1980 (CISG).

Prof. Ferreri also published
articles in the field of comparative legal terminology; in relation to
phenomena of globalisation of law; in connection with the enactment of
international conventions and about the effect of instruments of soft law such
as the Lando Principles of Contract Law (PECL). She is a member of the
International Academy of Comparative Law, an active contributor to the
Association H. Capitant des amis de la culture juridique française and is a
member of several national teams sponsored by the Ministry of Research. She
participates in the Acquis Group (an international working team sponsored by
the Commission of the European Union to restate and bring up to date the
"acquis communautaire" in the field of contract law: references are available
on the internet at www.acquis-group.org).

One of Prof. Fereri's main
area of research is the relationship between law and language, with a special
interest in the effort to shape a European language of the law, in the process
by which English is becoming the means of communication within Europe: a great
deal is to be learned in the gradual transformation of a language connected
with the common law tradition into a "lingua franca", a "globish" instrument
incorporating words and concepts deriving from many different local traditions.
She works on a national project with the University of Milan
with Prof. Antonio Gambaro on "multilingual legislation."